Where Does the Racialized Pro-Life Movement Stand on Troy Davis?

Barring a miracle of conscience, the state of Georgia is going to execute Troy Davis at 7 PM for a crime he did not commit.

I’d like to know where the racialized anti-abortion movement is now.

Where is Life Dynamics, the group behind blackgenocide.com? Where do they stand on legal lynching?

Where is Radiance Foundation co-founder Ryan Bomberger? His group recently erected billboards across Sacramento that say “Fatherhood begins in the womb” and show a black man kissing the stomach of a black woman who appears to be about eight and a half months pregnant. (Given that only 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy and the overwhelming majority of late-term abortions are performed to save the life of the mother, this visual makes zero sense.) Bomberger blames the “abortion industry” and “liberal feminism” for the “nationwide family crisis” of fatherlessness. But is Roe vs. Wade, Planned Parenthood and feminism the problem? Or is it a reckless, racist prison industrial complex that makes the threat of imprisonment so palpable to black men and women that witnesses in cases like Davis’s are willing to “give police what they want” to get the hell out of the station house?

Where is Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece Alveda? The Radiance Foundation supporter* could easily stand with her cousin Bernice, who asked the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Davis clemency late last week. Alveda could also borrow the words of her late, great aunt Coretta, the death penalty abolitionist who famously said, “Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder.”

Where is Stephen Broden, the Texas pastor who dared link those infamous danger-womb billboards to Black History Month? He recently claimed that the “effect of abortion in the black community is clear as one examines the numbers.” Since he’s a fan of numbers, how about 130? That’s the number of people on death row who have been exonerated since 1973.

You get where I’m going with this. So I’ll conclude with the words of Feministing.com contributor Zerlina Maxwell:

Perhaps these not so pro-life groups could focus their energy [on] creating billboards of black men like Troy Davis who are on death row about to be executed for crimes they didn’t commit. … The fact that the not so pro-life movement remains silent on the state sponsored murder of an innocent man proves they don’t really care about LIFE. But we already knew that.

*post has been updated since publication.

Read this online at http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/09/where_does_the_racialized_pro-life_movement_stand_on_troy_davis.html

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